Alternately, if you want to go back that far, then recording anything is a "recent innovation". Fact is, almost shortly after recording was invented, selling recordings came on the scene.
This is an important fact that the people who want to turn the music industry back to the 19th century fail to understand: a lot of people want good music recordings which can't be produced unless the producers can be paid for the recording itself.
There's a difference in the law between granting a copyright license over a work (a "license agreement") and authorizing the use of one's identifiable likeness for advertising (a "model release"). The one does not imply the other; if I take a photo of you I have the copyright to that photo and have the right to license it to others, but nobody has any automatic right to use your recognizable likeness in that photo to advertise that product. The advertiser must secure both copyright and a model release. (If the licensee is a newspaper using it for reporting or editorial purposes, then it's another story.)
Of course, all this means really is that OP quoted the wrong section of the license agreement:
You can use your privacy settings to limit how your name and profile picture may be associated with commercial or sponsored content. You give us permission to use your name and profile picture in connection with that content, subject to the limits you place.
In short: you grant them a copyright license to any pictures you upload, which allows them to sublicense to any associates of their. You also grant them, given certain profile settings, a model release to your profile picture, that allows them to use your name and profile picture to advertise any of their partners' products.
On the surface, that sounds good. But how do you differentiate between drivers and their rates? Should a driver with a 20 year perfect record pay the same as a 19 year old with 4 speeding tickets and 2 serious accidents? Or differentiating between different cars. A VW Beetle vs a Mustang Cobra. Same insurance rate at the pump?
There's a decent chance that a combination of both approaches is more efficient than either on its own, though. This would involve a fixed rate at the pump that provides a baseline level of insurance, plus compulsory supplementary coverage whose rate depends on the actuarial tables on age, record, car model, etc. The pump insurance might pay only up to a fixed amount per incident (or victim, perhaps?), and the rest of the coverage then would have to come from the supplementary policy. This way, a portion of the claims paid for each accident comes from taxes based on distance driven, and another from insurance rates based on the driver's record, car model, etc.
This is not to say that this is necessarily better than having insurers just check your odometer periodically; rather, the point is to remind us all that insurance schemes can be composed to produce different outcomes than each of them independently. It all comes down to whether the cost of the extra complexity is lower than the savings from the improved measurement and pricing of the risk factors.
1) The bulk of many (most?) software packages are resources, not executables
2) A lot of the executables is a lot of linker/DLL overhead, specially the smaller ones
These are not a problem, because the bulk of the changes involved in security fixes are code changes. Or to put it differently, even if the bulk of most software packages is resources, linker and DLL overhead, the bulk of most security fix diffs is code.
3) The optimizers (I think) remix the assembly instructions, so small changes in the program logic result in a lot of changes in assembly, ergo, in machine code. The best solution in terms of BW remains sending diffs in high level source code.
I think you overestimate the effect of optimizing compilers in this regard. Small changes in code--things like inserting a line for a missing bounds or null check--should not produce large-scale changes in the assembly code, but mostly the deletion or insertion of a bit of code.
There's also the fact that (a) there's little motive to use full-blown optimized compilation on most of an application's code (best save it for the 20% of the code that runs 80% of the time), and (b) most security fixes are small anyway.
Wells Fargo (holder of the senior mortgage) is trying to clear out all the subsidiary mortgage interests so that it can sell the property. In the process of doing so, it has to sue itself for record-keeping purposes - if I'm going to buy some property, I want a clear case record showing that all existing claims have been discharged.
Um, a few points:
Courts don't exist for record-keeping. They exist to settle disputes between legal persons.
The record is clarified plenty enough by WFC, as plaintiff, simply demonstrating in its filings that it is both the primary lien holder and one of the secondary lien holders.
WFC cannot complain that it was damaged by the discharge of all of the secondary liens when this was done in favor of its own primary lien. Why? Because in that situation, WFC's primary claim was left as the only claim--which means that all of the money that is recovered goes to WFC, and WFC would not stand to get any more redress if its secondary claim was left.
Why not file a motion, have the other department agree with all points and settle out of court, so the company as a whole can get on with what it needs to do.
The whole company is one party in the eyes of the law; two deparments of the same company are not. For this reason, two departments of the same corporation cannot "settle out of court"; they can't have a legal dispute between them to start with.
The sane thing to do is for WFC to file its complaint as plaintiff, and to note in it that WFC is both a primary and secondary lien holder. It cannot file a complaint against itself because it cannot have a controversy against itself. When it comes to the requirement that all secondary lien holders be notified about the action, well, WFC cannot represent to the court that it was not informed about the complaint that might dismiss its secondary lien, because the complaint was filed by WFC itself.
While it may seem stupid (and I agree with you, it does), it is apparently necessary for the particular suit to go forward, as GGP says. Usually, I would say this means the law needs to be changed; however, this law actually makes sense. This just happens to be a really strange application of that law.
No, the idea that a lawsuit is a way of settling a dispute between two different parties is so fundamental to the law that the statute in question must be interpreted not to require a party to sue itself. You. Cannot. Sue. Yourself. It doesn't matter what some random statute says; courts don't hear cases where a party opposes itself, because, to put it technically, it is pointless and stupid; there is no dispute to resolve.
Except in this case it bought into both sides of an 80/20 mortgage, in which case it intentionally set itself in conflict with itself, during the inevitable foreclosure, one of the investments will lose the lawsuit to the other investment.
No, the bank isn't in conflict with itself. It just has two separate claims on the same collateral, one senior to the other. The bank should get its senior claim settled ahead of the junior claims; then the scraps that remain (if any) are adjudicated among junior claims, one of which belongs to the bank itself. So if the the senior debt is for $300,000, the junior debt is five liens for $20,000 each, and the collateral is worth $350,000, the solution is the following:
The senior creditor gets $300,000.
The remaining $50,000 is split among the five remaining junior creditors. Each gets $10,000.
In this case, it just so happens that one of the junior creditors is also the senior creditor. So that party gets $310,000.
This is all just nonsense. Courts exist to settle disputes between conflicting interests. Wells Fargo can't sue itself because it can't have a dispute with itself; the two "parties" to this "dispute" have, by identity, the exact same interests. So the argument you're making, that Wells Fargo really ought to argue both sides of its self-suit earnestly in order not to bias the proceedings, just rests in the absurd premise that a party can sue itself.
The correct thing is for Wells Fargo, as the primary lien holder and one of the secondary lien holders, to sue all of the other secondary lien holders. The proceedings and decision should take into account the fact that WFC is both a primary and a secondary lienholder. So, for example, WFC should argue along the liens that as primary lienholders, they should get X, and that if they somehow don't get it, as secondary lienholders, they should get Y.
4) Florida State government: For writing a law that requires a bank to sue itself.
I actually don't think that the law requires the bank to sue itself, given that, um, the courts simply don't allow anybody to sue themselves. A lawsuit is a process to settle a dispute between two parties. A party can't have a dispute with itself, period, because by definition it has the same interests as itself.
Even moving the argument to something viable like "the earth is at the centre of the solar system", that was a religious viewpoint, not a scientific one - indeed science disproved that, and the religious overlords (supported by their uneducated followers) certainly saw to punish said scientist for that.
Geocentrism comes from Aristotle and Ptolemy, who rejected the Pythagoreans' heliocentric model on theoretical and empirical grounds. Theoretical grounds because Aristotelian mechanics requires that there exist a frame of reference that is truly at rest, and that frame of reference has to be the Earth. Empirical because Ptolemy had a model that predicted the motions of the heavens as accurately as could be observed for over two thousand years, and was not improved upon until after Galileo's death.
When Galileo wrote his work, astronomers correctly pointed out that his theory contradicted Aristotelian mechanics, and that it predicted stellar parallax, which wasn't observed until 1838. Strictly speaking, geostaticism (the idea that the Earth doesn't move) wasnt refuted until 1725.
The Church rejected Galileo's theory on a combination of both religious and scientific grounds. The Galileo affair is a prime example of why the Church shouldn't be allowed to regulate science, but it is not an example of Church obscurantism and Biblical fundamentalism; the Church did not in fact claim that "it says so in the Bible" was evidence enough to refute Galileo. Galileo was tried for pissing off the Pope, and for telling people that the Bible ought to be interpreted in a different way on the basis of his theory.
There may have been some denial from the religious [...]
Even this is seriously misleading, in that it suggests that religious institutions were some sort of hotbed of flat-earthism. In fact, spherical Earth has pretty much always been the dominant model within Christianity. For example, Saint Augustine's argument that the southern hemisphere (a.k.a. "the Antipodes") must be uninhabited, because (a) all humans descend from Adam and Eve; (b) the equatorial regions of the Earth have a "torrid" climate that's inhospitable to human beings, and thus are unpassable; (c) Jesus would have had to come a second time to the Antipodes in order to save the Antipodeans, and that would contradict the Gospel.
Sure, to us that sounds like a very silly argument, but the important thing to note is that it takes for granted that the Earth is spherical. This was in the late 300's.
Some of us care about the little details. The fact that it comes under the heading of "casual photography" doesn't mean that you necessarily want to be sloppy with it. The end results with any luck will last as long as conventional print photography has. There's no reason to do anything besides "do it right" if you are the owner of the prevailing platform for "professional artists".
Two points:
Apple makes Aperture, which is a really good application for advanced amateur and professional photographers. The controls provided make it really easy to make a lot of very sophisticated photo adjustments really fast, compared to, say, Photoshop. (I haven't used Lightroom, though.) Those controls still do require a pretty advanced understanding of digital imaging.
iPhoto is still a really good application for people who primarily shoot compact digital cameras, and use the jpegs straight out of the camera. The big feature there is photo cataloguing. The adjustment tools are pretty basic and not good for detailed work (e.g., no white balance dropper; the histogram only has sliders for black and white point). However, the intended user audience for the application is not at all capable of doing such work.
That's like saying the drawback to commercial aircraft is that they are designed by aeronautical engineers.
But that has in fact often been a problem. There are many aircraft accidents where bad human factors design played a major role. For just one example, check out this Bruce Tognazzini article.
Isn't that already the case with most of the free software anyway? I mean not many people might be contributing to every project, but I don't think that is because the core team wouldn't accept outside contributions. In fact, what the hell does "outsider" mean in this context? I suppose anyone is usually free to start contributing to any project they like; usually it is hard to get accepted as part of the team but that is mostly because you can't expect to just get up one morning and figure out everything about an already existing project or convince everyone that what you want to add is in fact a desirable feature.
The major problem is in fact that people who control a project can be incredibly hostile to doing things that improve usability, and will just not compromise because they see no reason to do so.
A relevant example: Linus's uncompromisingly negative attitude toward Unicode normalization of filenames. OS X's HFS+ filesystem guarantees that all names are stored in normalized UTF-8; Linux's ext3 apparently just lets you use whatever you want. This means that in a Linux system, you could search for a file called Martínez.txt (note the accent on the "i"), search for a file whose name contains the subtstring Martínez, and not get a match because the filename and the search string are using two different representations of the accented "i". Or, from the user point of view, you get a search term that doesn't match itself.
At any rate, you do seem to agree that getting project owners to accept usability contributions is an obstacle. What I want to point out is that very often the obstacle is just not practically surmountable, period.
I agree with the article that user involvement is key. However, users are clueless about what they really want and you can't possibly use them to write the specs of your product! On the other hand, developers tend to reject criticism from end-users because they lack technical expertise.
I get the impression you didn't understand the article then, because quite early on they approvingly cite this (which they attribute to Jason Snell of MacWorld):
"Apple excels at creating products that the general public likes because the company is driven by design, not by engineering." [my emphasis]
They're not simply asking users what they want and then just doing what the users say; that would indeed be a recipe for disaster. They have design people in charge of figuring out what the products should be, validating proposed designs against user focus groups, sitting end-users down for experiments to see how usable something is, discovering usability problems with existing products, etc. And then they use this sort of information to decide what to build.
I can think of one approach that might work: build a really good analytics library that would measure various usability aspects.
Won't work. You need to know what the user is trying to do to interpret the data, and the software can't read the user's mind.
Yech. It requires reading the file twice, and it's not even 100% reliable.
AFAIK it's not possible to do it in a 100% reliable fashion, but there are technical solutions where the file doesn't need to be read twice. Java, despite all of its flaws, handles this sort of thing pretty well, so I'll use that as an example.
In Java, there is a distinction between byte-based and character-based I/O. InputStream and OutputStream are byte-based I/O classes; Reader and Writer are character-based. Then you have classes like InputStreamReader that bridge the two worlds; an InputStreamReader is a reader that pulls bytes from an InputStream and passes them through a CharsetDecoder to converts them to the system's internal string representation (which is UTF-16).
So in Java, to read and validate the file in one pass, you just need to hook up your InputStream/InputStreamReader/CharsetDecoder pipeline so that the decoder throws an exception when the file does not conform to the encoding. This is one of various built-in strategies for CharsetDecoder; others are to ignore the invalid data and try to recover, or to insert some predefined character.
People coming from Perl or similar systems, when they see this for the first time, tend to think that this is much too complicated, especially when they notice all the associated extra classes like CoderResult and CodingErrorAction. It might be a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but certainly the best solution to reading characters from files is going to be more complex than what these people want.
If you search Google for samba, only two of the main results are for, you know, Samba. To their credit: (a) the two video results are for the music, (b) Google Brazil's results are better.
So, if a particular illegal or actionable activity is traced to a particular IP address, can this ruling be used to indicate: "It wasn't me, an IP address identifies a computer, not a person, re: so-and-so vs. so-and-so" or is that just silliness?
I don't think this particular ruling would be relevant to such a case, and at any rate, you don't need this ruling to argue that.
Basically, try to think of how a murder case for a drive-by shooting would go, where a witness noted down the license plate of the car, but didn't see the shooters. The license plate can and will be used to track down the car's owner. This person and various of their associates and acquaintances will be interviewed by the police. If the police and the prosecutor think that the car owner committed the crime, they will bring charges against him, and the license plate number will be part of the evidence that the prosecution uses to make the case that the accused committed the crime. But the police will try to gather more evidence than just the license plate; they will try to establish things like motive, too.
It's not really much different with IP addresses. There's a possibility that the person who the IP address was assigned to at the moment of the crime isn't the one who actually did it. But the IP address will be used to tie that person as a suspect to the crime, obtain search warrants, confiscate computer equipment and search it. Then if a case is brought against the holder of the IP address, the IP address will be used as evidence along with other results of the investigation.
Note that the big problem with the RIAA's court cases is that they're not law enforcement, and thus, they're not really doing a lot of investigation about what the IP address holders in their complaints actually did.
Cue the idiots saying that computers should only support English, because otherwise it allows those other people to isolate themselves from us/not get on with the program/just stop existing already...
That's not really my point. I'm not saying distribution is the only service the media companies provide. What I'm saying is the way they expect to be remunerated for these services is by placing a surcharge on the costs of distribution. I'm saying that the business model is fundamentally linked to distribution. And I'm saying that as real world distribution costs approach zero, it's going to get harder and harder to enforce the state monopoly that is copyright.
Fair enough. The problem is that a surcharge on distribution is the most sensible way of remunerating the record industry for the services it provides. How else are the costs of producing professional music recordings going to be recovered? The two commonly proposed alternatives that come to my mind are:
Government subsidy of the record industry by taxing the means of distribution (e.g., taxes on raw recording media and internet access).
Advertising; either of third-party commercial products, or just to attract public to the artist's performances.
The tax-and-subsidize one clearly has a lot of awful problems which I won't go into (mostly because hardly anybody on Slashdot would be for it in the first place). The second one I think just is a step back from what we had 20-30 years ago; it just grossly disincentivizes spending money on making elaborate music productions to start with, unless they can be used to advertise a commercial sponsor (bands who supposedly want to attract public will just record their live performances).
And for that reason, I think they're inevitably going to lose this fight.
But what I would answer to that is that I'm concerned it's not just them who are going to lose. It's not like the music industry are saints by any means, or that everything they've done has been positive. It's that having a corrupt music industry that can finance elaborate productions might be a lesser evil. We might be worse off in a world where the only way to afford making a really well produced album is by making all your songs be about Pepsi or Calvin Klein--a world where the only option to that is to make crappy home recordings.
But when Sony argues that they're defending the "rights of the artists" whilst taking 100% of the artist's royalties until promotional bills are paid in full (thus forcing the artist to pay for the production and promotion of the recording, but without actually giving the artist control over the budget for production or promotion), it's hard to be sympathetic.
I don't think it's easy to be sympathetic with either party to that kind of deal. Don't absolve the artists so easily. They have the option not to enter into such a contract. What you find, however, is that there are plenty of dumbasses willing to enter into rotten deals with the record label without thinking it very well, because they're thinking of living out some sort of rock 'n roll fantasy.
The bottom line? In a time when media can be distributed for costs approaching zero, I question whether charging for distribution remains a viable way to compensate creators. And if, as I suspect it is not, then I have to question the utility of copyright itself.
What you're failing to see is that the record labels are actually offering a bundle of services, and not just distribution. They also offer the following:
Financing of the artists' production costs
Facilitation of access to studios, sound engineers and other such capital
Marketing and promotion
Selectivity: a record label only signs a minority of artists that they think are good. They filter out bad artists so that the public doesn't have to.
So copyright isn't just about recovering the cost of distributing a finished work; it's about recovering the cost of producing and marketing the work. Some of that cost has gone down with technological advances, but a lot of it has not.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an important fact that the people who want to turn the music industry back to the 19th century fail to understand: a lot of people want good music recordings which can't be produced unless the producers can be paid for the recording itself.
There's a difference in the law between granting a copyright license over a work (a "license agreement") and authorizing the use of one's identifiable likeness for advertising (a "model release"). The one does not imply the other; if I take a photo of you I have the copyright to that photo and have the right to license it to others, but nobody has any automatic right to use your recognizable likeness in that photo to advertise that product. The advertiser must secure both copyright and a model release. (If the licensee is a newspaper using it for reporting or editorial purposes, then it's another story.)
Of course, all this means really is that OP quoted the wrong section of the license agreement:
In short: you grant them a copyright license to any pictures you upload, which allows them to sublicense to any associates of their. You also grant them, given certain profile settings, a model release to your profile picture, that allows them to use your name and profile picture to advertise any of their partners' products.
There's a decent chance that a combination of both approaches is more efficient than either on its own, though. This would involve a fixed rate at the pump that provides a baseline level of insurance, plus compulsory supplementary coverage whose rate depends on the actuarial tables on age, record, car model, etc. The pump insurance might pay only up to a fixed amount per incident (or victim, perhaps?), and the rest of the coverage then would have to come from the supplementary policy. This way, a portion of the claims paid for each accident comes from taxes based on distance driven, and another from insurance rates based on the driver's record, car model, etc.
This is not to say that this is necessarily better than having insurers just check your odometer periodically; rather, the point is to remind us all that insurance schemes can be composed to produce different outcomes than each of them independently. It all comes down to whether the cost of the extra complexity is lower than the savings from the improved measurement and pricing of the risk factors.
These are not a problem, because the bulk of the changes involved in security fixes are code changes. Or to put it differently, even if the bulk of most software packages is resources, linker and DLL overhead, the bulk of most security fix diffs is code.
I think you overestimate the effect of optimizing compilers in this regard. Small changes in code--things like inserting a line for a missing bounds or null check--should not produce large-scale changes in the assembly code, but mostly the deletion or insertion of a bit of code.
There's also the fact that (a) there's little motive to use full-blown optimized compilation on most of an application's code (best save it for the 20% of the code that runs 80% of the time), and (b) most security fixes are small anyway.
Um, a few points:
The whole company is one party in the eyes of the law; two deparments of the same company are not. For this reason, two departments of the same corporation cannot "settle out of court"; they can't have a legal dispute between them to start with.
The sane thing to do is for WFC to file its complaint as plaintiff, and to note in it that WFC is both a primary and secondary lien holder. It cannot file a complaint against itself because it cannot have a controversy against itself. When it comes to the requirement that all secondary lien holders be notified about the action, well, WFC cannot represent to the court that it was not informed about the complaint that might dismiss its secondary lien, because the complaint was filed by WFC itself.
No, the idea that a lawsuit is a way of settling a dispute between two different parties is so fundamental to the law that the statute in question must be interpreted not to require a party to sue itself. You. Cannot. Sue. Yourself. It doesn't matter what some random statute says; courts don't hear cases where a party opposes itself, because, to put it technically, it is pointless and stupid; there is no dispute to resolve.
No, the bank isn't in conflict with itself. It just has two separate claims on the same collateral, one senior to the other. The bank should get its senior claim settled ahead of the junior claims; then the scraps that remain (if any) are adjudicated among junior claims, one of which belongs to the bank itself. So if the the senior debt is for $300,000, the junior debt is five liens for $20,000 each, and the collateral is worth $350,000, the solution is the following:
In this case, it just so happens that one of the junior creditors is also the senior creditor. So that party gets $310,000.
This is all just nonsense. Courts exist to settle disputes between conflicting interests. Wells Fargo can't sue itself because it can't have a dispute with itself; the two "parties" to this "dispute" have, by identity, the exact same interests. So the argument you're making, that Wells Fargo really ought to argue both sides of its self-suit earnestly in order not to bias the proceedings, just rests in the absurd premise that a party can sue itself.
The correct thing is for Wells Fargo, as the primary lien holder and one of the secondary lien holders, to sue all of the other secondary lien holders. The proceedings and decision should take into account the fact that WFC is both a primary and a secondary lienholder. So, for example, WFC should argue along the liens that as primary lienholders, they should get X, and that if they somehow don't get it, as secondary lienholders, they should get Y.
I actually don't think that the law requires the bank to sue itself, given that, um, the courts simply don't allow anybody to sue themselves. A lawsuit is a process to settle a dispute between two parties. A party can't have a dispute with itself, period, because by definition it has the same interests as itself.
Geocentrism comes from Aristotle and Ptolemy, who rejected the Pythagoreans' heliocentric model on theoretical and empirical grounds. Theoretical grounds because Aristotelian mechanics requires that there exist a frame of reference that is truly at rest, and that frame of reference has to be the Earth. Empirical because Ptolemy had a model that predicted the motions of the heavens as accurately as could be observed for over two thousand years, and was not improved upon until after Galileo's death.
When Galileo wrote his work, astronomers correctly pointed out that his theory contradicted Aristotelian mechanics, and that it predicted stellar parallax, which wasn't observed until 1838. Strictly speaking, geostaticism (the idea that the Earth doesn't move) wasnt refuted until 1725.
The Church rejected Galileo's theory on a combination of both religious and scientific grounds. The Galileo affair is a prime example of why the Church shouldn't be allowed to regulate science, but it is not an example of Church obscurantism and Biblical fundamentalism; the Church did not in fact claim that "it says so in the Bible" was evidence enough to refute Galileo. Galileo was tried for pissing off the Pope, and for telling people that the Bible ought to be interpreted in a different way on the basis of his theory.
Even this is seriously misleading, in that it suggests that religious institutions were some sort of hotbed of flat-earthism. In fact, spherical Earth has pretty much always been the dominant model within Christianity. For example, Saint Augustine's argument that the southern hemisphere (a.k.a. "the Antipodes") must be uninhabited, because (a) all humans descend from Adam and Eve; (b) the equatorial regions of the Earth have a "torrid" climate that's inhospitable to human beings, and thus are unpassable; (c) Jesus would have had to come a second time to the Antipodes in order to save the Antipodeans, and that would contradict the Gospel.
Sure, to us that sounds like a very silly argument, but the important thing to note is that it takes for granted that the Earth is spherical. This was in the late 300's.
Two points:
But that has in fact often been a problem. There are many aircraft accidents where bad human factors design played a major role. For just one example, check out this Bruce Tognazzini article.
The major problem is in fact that people who control a project can be incredibly hostile to doing things that improve usability, and will just not compromise because they see no reason to do so.
A relevant example: Linus's uncompromisingly negative attitude toward Unicode normalization of filenames. OS X's HFS+ filesystem guarantees that all names are stored in normalized UTF-8; Linux's ext3 apparently just lets you use whatever you want. This means that in a Linux system, you could search for a file called Martínez.txt (note the accent on the "i"), search for a file whose name contains the subtstring Martínez, and not get a match because the filename and the search string are using two different representations of the accented "i". Or, from the user point of view, you get a search term that doesn't match itself.
At any rate, you do seem to agree that getting project owners to accept usability contributions is an obstacle. What I want to point out is that very often the obstacle is just not practically surmountable, period.
I get the impression you didn't understand the article then, because quite early on they approvingly cite this (which they attribute to Jason Snell of MacWorld):
They're not simply asking users what they want and then just doing what the users say; that would indeed be a recipe for disaster. They have design people in charge of figuring out what the products should be, validating proposed designs against user focus groups, sitting end-users down for experiments to see how usable something is, discovering usability problems with existing products, etc. And then they use this sort of information to decide what to build.
Won't work. You need to know what the user is trying to do to interpret the data, and the software can't read the user's mind.
Um, I take that back. The two video results are for some ungodly ballroom dance thing.
AFAIK it's not possible to do it in a 100% reliable fashion, but there are technical solutions where the file doesn't need to be read twice. Java, despite all of its flaws, handles this sort of thing pretty well, so I'll use that as an example.
In Java, there is a distinction between byte-based and character-based I/O. InputStream and OutputStream are byte-based I/O classes; Reader and Writer are character-based. Then you have classes like InputStreamReader that bridge the two worlds; an InputStreamReader is a reader that pulls bytes from an InputStream and passes them through a CharsetDecoder to converts them to the system's internal string representation (which is UTF-16).
So in Java, to read and validate the file in one pass, you just need to hook up your InputStream/InputStreamReader/CharsetDecoder pipeline so that the decoder throws an exception when the file does not conform to the encoding. This is one of various built-in strategies for CharsetDecoder; others are to ignore the invalid data and try to recover, or to insert some predefined character.
People coming from Perl or similar systems, when they see this for the first time, tend to think that this is much too complicated, especially when they notice all the associated extra classes like CoderResult and CodingErrorAction. It might be a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but certainly the best solution to reading characters from files is going to be more complex than what these people want.
If you search Google for samba, only two of the main results are for, you know, Samba. To their credit: (a) the two video results are for the music, (b) Google Brazil's results are better.
I don't think this particular ruling would be relevant to such a case, and at any rate, you don't need this ruling to argue that.
Basically, try to think of how a murder case for a drive-by shooting would go, where a witness noted down the license plate of the car, but didn't see the shooters. The license plate can and will be used to track down the car's owner. This person and various of their associates and acquaintances will be interviewed by the police. If the police and the prosecutor think that the car owner committed the crime, they will bring charges against him, and the license plate number will be part of the evidence that the prosecution uses to make the case that the accused committed the crime. But the police will try to gather more evidence than just the license plate; they will try to establish things like motive, too.
It's not really much different with IP addresses. There's a possibility that the person who the IP address was assigned to at the moment of the crime isn't the one who actually did it. But the IP address will be used to tie that person as a suspect to the crime, obtain search warrants, confiscate computer equipment and search it. Then if a case is brought against the holder of the IP address, the IP address will be used as evidence along with other results of the investigation.
Note that the big problem with the RIAA's court cases is that they're not law enforcement, and thus, they're not really doing a lot of investigation about what the IP address holders in their complaints actually did.
Cue the idiots saying that computers should only support English, because otherwise it allows those other people to isolate themselves from us/not get on with the program/just stop existing already...
This is just wrong on both counts:
Fair enough. The problem is that a surcharge on distribution is the most sensible way of remunerating the record industry for the services it provides. How else are the costs of producing professional music recordings going to be recovered? The two commonly proposed alternatives that come to my mind are:
The tax-and-subsidize one clearly has a lot of awful problems which I won't go into (mostly because hardly anybody on Slashdot would be for it in the first place). The second one I think just is a step back from what we had 20-30 years ago; it just grossly disincentivizes spending money on making elaborate music productions to start with, unless they can be used to advertise a commercial sponsor (bands who supposedly want to attract public will just record their live performances).
But what I would answer to that is that I'm concerned it's not just them who are going to lose. It's not like the music industry are saints by any means, or that everything they've done has been positive. It's that having a corrupt music industry that can finance elaborate productions might be a lesser evil. We might be worse off in a world where the only way to afford making a really well produced album is by making all your songs be about Pepsi or Calvin Klein--a world where the only option to that is to make crappy home recordings.
I don't think it's easy to be sympathetic with either party to that kind of deal. Don't absolve the artists so easily. They have the option not to enter into such a contract. What you find, however, is that there are plenty of dumbasses willing to enter into rotten deals with the record label without thinking it very well, because they're thinking of living out some sort of rock 'n roll fantasy.
What you're failing to see is that the record labels are actually offering a bundle of services, and not just distribution. They also offer the following:
So copyright isn't just about recovering the cost of distributing a finished work; it's about recovering the cost of producing and marketing the work. Some of that cost has gone down with technological advances, but a lot of it has not.